


The Grand Parade

by miloron (ocoa)



Series: Random AUs for funsies [7]
Category: NU'EST, Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: AU - Veterans, Gen, PTSD, Suicide mention, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 17:53:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12438399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocoa/pseuds/miloron
Summary: Daehwi and Jonghyun are the last of the Great War’s soldiers alive, every one of their friends lost and gone in the war and in age.





	The Grand Parade

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up with plot suggestions or anything at my [askFM page](https://ask.fm/bugiron) hoho

 

They meet at last year’s parade, the only two left in a long road of cheering people waving their flag high and proud. He’s tired looking, a darkness in his eyes that Jonghyun recognises and relates to. It’s a consequence, remembering, but the burn of age has made the intensity fade into a throbbing numbness. They reach the monument, countless of names engraved into the marble. He finds his friends easy enough, and their dates of death. Aron’s isn’t on this one, he’s on the other wall with the rest of the bodies that haven’t been found.

50 years have passed since the day that Jonghyun enlisted for the Great War. 45 years on he still wakes up screaming for Minki to move, or Dongho to stay awake, or Aron to don’t go, or for Minhyun to _please don’t do this_. He has lost so many friends. Now it was just him and a corporal who was 6 years younger than him left.

“Lee Daehwi, right?”

The man looked up, and nodded jerkily.

“You lost someone?” It’s a stupid question, they’ve all lost someone, but he knows the look in Daehwi’s eyes. He needs someone to talk to.

He pointed at a name. Park Jihoon. “He was my best friend, along with Jinyoung, and Samuel. They all died at the frontlines.”

He rubbed his leg, absentminded. “I was supposed to be with them, but I had an old injury. They still sent me out after the first year.”

Jonghyun nodded slowly. “My friends and I were part of the army even before the war. It was the first two weeks and I lost 3 of them. The last one bit iron a year after the war ended.”

Daehwi opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it. No “sorry”s could bring their friends back, and neither does it help. Facts are facts. Jonghyun patted his back.

“Hard to imagine that the only the two of us are left,” Daehwi says instead, staring up at the towering marble. The two of them were so small in such a long list of their friends and family gone.

“Yeah.”

The ceremony ends fast after that, just another checklist done in the flurry of the world around them, leaving only the two, old men with tired and burdened hearts staring up at the last memory of the people they’ve lost. The war had been gone for a long time, but unlike the running feet of their descendants, they still hear the guns in the rumble of the train tracks and the blasts of bombs in the screaming alarms. But Jonghyun knows, as someone who had seen the shadows creep up on his friends and acquaintances’ faces, who had seen strong men crumble and loop rope around their necks.

Daehwi looks much worse at age 70 than Jonghyun’s 76, so it’s not much of a surprise the next year when he watches Daehwi’s name being etched into the bottom of the monument, and he’s alone in a world that has moved past the war. The rain falls, and his umbrella is heavy. At the very least, he thinks as the coffin is lowered to the screams of trumpets and the flag of their nation, Corporal Lee Daehwi was free from the war that existed after the Great War, the one that still has Jonghyun watch the birds and hear planes and bombs go off in their chirps. Blinking away the thought, he trudged on, a single shadow in a crowd of people.

There’s a space left, he thinks, fit for one last name.

**Author's Note:**

> “Life is a never ending fight, and as much as I want to give up, I don’t stop fighting.”


End file.
